collectivization

The chapter critically examines the role of the Soviet-backed Communist leadership and the central government during the Spanish Civil War, highlighting how their bureaucratic control and foreign policy priorities suppressed spontaneous revolutionary collectivization efforts. It details how government interventions, including legal decrees and economic restrictions, systematically dismantled workers' control over industries and agriculture in Catalonia, undermining the revolutionary movement despite strong worker enthusiasm. The analysis challenges narratives blaming anarchists for failures, instead emphasizing political interference and state reassertion of private ownership rights as key factors in the rollback of collectivization.

The chapter examines the anarchist-led revolutionary transformations during the Spanish Civil War, focusing on workers' self-management and collectivization efforts in Catalonia, while highlighting the political sabotage by the Communist Party through withholding arms from the Aragon front. It also critiques the ambivalent foreign intervention, particularly by Britain, and exposes the contradictory application of civil liberties that favored fascist agents over anarchist and socialist workers. Orwell's eyewitness accounts provide a vivid perspective on the revolutionary idealism and internal left-wing conflicts that shaped the complex political dynamics of Republican Spain.

This chapter analyzes Soviet high modernism's cultural and administrative roots, emphasizing the Bolsheviks' ambition to reshape society through monumental projects and cultural revolutions. It highlights the transnational exchange of ideas between Soviet and American agricultural planners who shared a high-modernist faith in large-scale, mechanized industrial farming. The chapter also critically examines the failures of such industrial farms, which often ignored local contexts and complexities, revealing the limitations of centralized, standardized planning.

The chapter critically examines the Soviet collectivization of agriculture as an authoritarian high-modernist project that sought to replace traditional peasant structures and local knowledge with large-scale, mechanized, and centrally planned farms. This process dismantled the mir, imposed rigid labor regimes resembling serfdom, and created a dependent peasantry optimized for state appropriation, yet ultimately failed to achieve the promised agricultural efficiency due to the neglect of local conditions and the limits of centralized control. The analysis highlights the state's preference for legibility, appropriation, and centralization, contrasting the relative success of collectivization in mechanizable crops like wheat with its failure in knowledge-intensive crops like raspberries, underscoring the importance of local knowledge in effective governance.